Hidden Riches

to a prize student. “You have a good eye.”
    “I love things,” she confessed. “Owning things.”
    “Ah, yes. I understand.” He reached up to brush a fingertip lightly over her lapel pin. “A plique-à-jour—early nineteen hundreds.”
    She beamed back at him. “You, too, have a good eye.”
    “I have a brooch I’d like you to see.” He thought of the sapphire, and the pleasure it would give him to taunt her with it. “I only recently acquired it, and I know you’d appreciate it. So it is decided. I’ll have a car pick you up at your hotel. Say, seven-thirty.”
    “I . . .”
    “Please, don’t misunderstand. My home is fully staffed, so you’ll be well chaperoned. But I don’t often have the opportunity to show off my treasures to someone who recognizes their intrinsic worth. I’d love your opinion on my pomander collection.”
    “Pomanders?” Dora said, and sighed. If she hadn’t been on a mission, she’d have agreed in any case. How could she resist a collection of pomanders? “I’d love to.”
    * * *
    Dora strolled back into the hotel room filled with the warmth of success. She found Jed pacing, the air blue with smoke and rattled by an old war movie on television he wasn’t watching.
    “What the hell took you so long?”
    “It was only an hour.” She slipped out of her shoes as she walked to him. “I was brilliant,” she said, and wrapped her arms around his neck.
    “I’ll tell you if you were brilliant.” He put a hand on top of her head and pushed her into a chair. Snatching the remote, he ended the war with a fizzle. “You tell me about Finley. Everything, from the top.”
    “Is there any coffee left?” She picked up a room-service pot, sniffed the contents. “Let me savor the moment, will you?” She poured coffee and sipped it black and tepid. “I want some cheesecake,” she decided. “Order us up some cheesecake, okay?”
    “Don’t push it, Conroy.”
    “You know how to take the fun out of things. All right.” She took a last sip, sat back and told him.
    “He really was nice,” she concluded. “Very understanding, and properly shocked by my story. I, of course, played the part of the high-strung, spooked-at-every-shadow heroine to perfection. The police simply aren’t doing enough to ease my mind, so he very gallantly offered to do whatever he could, down to hiring a private firm to track down DiCarlo.”
    “What about Winesap?”
    “He wasn’t there. I asked for him at first, but the receptionist told me he was out of the office today.”
    “If he’s the one who’s going to keep the appointment next Thursday, he couldn’t afford having you see him.”
    “I thought of that. So I stopped to talk to the security guard in the lower lobby on the way out. I told him I’d seen Abel Winesap’s name on the board, and that my father had worked with an Abel Winesap once, years ago, andhad lost touch. So I asked if this guy was tall and heavyset with red hair. It turns out this Winesap is short and skinny, round-shouldered and balding.”
    “Good girl, Nancy.”
    “Thanks, Ned. Do you think Nancy and Ned ever made love? You know, in the back of her coupe after a particularly satisfying case.”
    “I like to think so. Get back on track, Conroy.”
    “Okay.” Now came the hard part, Dora mused. She would have to work up to it carefully. “Finley’s office is incredible—oh, I forgot to mention the monitors. He has a whole wall of them. Kind of creepy, you know? All these television shows running silently side by side with different parts of the building. I guess he has security cameras everywhere. But that’s not why it’s incredible. He had a Gallé lamp in his office that made me want to sit up and beg. And a Han horse. That barely touches on it. Anyway, I’ll see his personal collection at dinner tonight.”
    Jed snatched her wrist before she could bound up. “Play that back, Conroy, slow speed.”
    “I’m having dinner with him.”
    “What makes you think so?”
    “Because he asked me, and I accepted. And before you start listing all the reasons why I shouldn’t, I’ll tell you why I should.” She’d worked it out point by point in the cab on the way back. “He was kind to me in the office—very concerned and avuncular. He believes I’m in town alone, and that I’m upset. He knows I have a rabid interest in collectibles and antiques. If I’d said no, it would have set the entirely wrong tone.”
    “If he’s involved, the